Zaka, an Israeli rescue agency, revealed that Israeli helicopters opened fire, killing civilians during the Hamas attack on October 7, killing over 260.
According to an RT article on November 6, Israeli soldiers are suspected of killing a large number of their own people when they launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7. This is supported by the release of drone footage by the Israeli military that shows hundreds of damaged and charred cars that were removed from the Nova music festival.
The Nova event was held in the vicinity of Kibbutz Beeri, about five km distant from the wall dividing Gaza. When Palestinian resistance fighters emerged from Gaza at 6:30 am, they attacked military bases and settlements, and this was one of their first objectives.
The Palestinian terrorists captured some 240 Israelis during the attack, including foreigners, settlers, and troops.
The recently released drone footage provides an aerial perspective of hundreds of wrecked and charred cars that were removed from the festival grounds and arranged in a makeshift junkyard on a dirt parking lot.
Zaka, an Israeli rescue agency, reports that they have taken 260 dead out of the event venue. Israel maintains that in the hours following the Hamas strike, civilian Palestinian looters and Hamas combatants rushed across the unguarded Gaza border fence, slaughtering them.
The video, however, seems to corroborate earlier claims made by Israeli media that Israeli pilots operating Apache helicopters opened fire on Israelis and Hamas fighters in response to the attacks.
According to a Yedioth Ahronoth article dated October 15, the first helicopters touched down in the Gaza Strip around one hour after hostilities started.
According to the Hebrew-language daily, the purpose of the armed Zik drones and combat helicopters was to halt the influx of Hamas fighters and looters into Israeli territory via the openings in the Gaza border fence.
Israel’s Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, provided an update stating that Israeli troops have trapped Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a bunker.
This was made more difficult by the pilots’ inability to tell Israelis from Palestinian looters disguised as civilians and Hamas combatants.
The paper notes, “This deception worked for a considerable time until the Apaches had to skip all the restrictions. It was only around 9:00 a.m. that some of them began to spray the terrorists with the cannons on their own, without authorization from superiors.”
“The rate of fire against the thousands of terrorists was tremendous at first, and only at a certain point did the pilots begin to slow down the attacks and carefully select the target,” the paper added.
Throughout the day, twenty-eight Israeli combat helicopters fired all of the ammunition they possessed, including Hellfire missiles and hundreds of 30 mm cannon shells, despite the confusion.
About ten in the morning, the commander of the 190 squadron told the other pilots “to shoot at everything they see in the fence area,” which divided Israel from Gaza, after landing his Apache to replenish ammunition.
The same commander once opened fire near houses in a kibbutz in support of an officer from the Sinai division who had parachuted into battle against Hamas militants, and assaulted an Israeli military station that had besieged soldiers inside to aid the Israeli army in regaining it from Hamas.
About 300 targets, the majority of which were on Israeli territory, were targeted by helicopters and fighter jets in the first four hours of combat, according to the air force.
Israeli military spokesman Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari hinted at Israel’s response to the Hamas attack and the prisoner situation in remarks made on October 7. He explained how the Israeli army used both airstrikes and ground forces to deal with “hostage situations.”
Hagari declared that there was “no community in southern Israel where we do not have forces, in all the towns,” and that the armed forces were “fighting in 22 locations.”
“There are special forces there with senior commanders, and live firefights are going on there,” he said.
According to Hagari, there have been strikes by Israel’s air force in “several locations,” resulting in “hundreds of deaths, including many terrorists.”
According to him, the primary goal was to “eliminate” everyone who had “infiltrated Israel and were attempting to return to the Gaza Strip.” “We will launch an air strike first, followed by a heavy ground strike,” he continued.
The safety of the hostages themselves was not a priority while responding to hostage situations with such overwhelming force.
According to The Guardian, late on October 7, while the Hamas attack was still going on, Israel’s powerful finance minister and settler leader, Bezalel Smotrich, urged the Israeli army to “hit Hamas brutally and not take the matter of the captives into significant consideration” during a cabinet meeting.
In a radio interview with Israeli official broadcaster Kan, Yasmin Porat, who escaped the Hamas attack on the Be’eri kibbutz close to Gaza on October 7, said that Israeli security forces had also killed civilians.
“They eliminated everyone, including the hostages,” the mother of three told Kan. “There was very, very heavy crossfire.”
As reported by Mondoweiss, a lengthy article about the difficult decision made by Israeli commander Brigadier General Avi Rosenfeld of the Gaza division to order airstrikes on his own base when Hamas fighters overran it and captured and killed many soldiers inside was published in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz on October 13.
With only a few male and female soldiers, Rosenfeld was trapped in the division’s underground war bunker and was working “desperately to rescue and organise the sector under attack.” Outside, many of the soldiers—the majority of whom were not in combat—were killed or injured. To drive out the terrorists, the division had to ask for an aircraft attack on the base itself.
A similar incident happened on October 7 during the Hamas offensive in Sderot, a 30,000-person city 12 kilometres from the Gaza border.
A week later, Chinese journalist Stephanie Freid from CGTN paid a visit to Sderot. Sderot “was a city taken over by Hamas fighters,” the reporter said. There were firefights and numerous fatalities. And the debris of the police station here serves as evidence of that. This place was taken over. Up to twenty persons, including inmates housed at the station, perished here.
When Israeli soldiers opened fire on the station with a tank, it appears that the Hamas fighters and their police hostages were killed.
Support GreatGameIndia
